Ethereum developers are steering toward an upgrade that could bring the most fundamental changes in the network’s programming environment since the original smart-contracts blockchain shook up the crypto industry when it launched nearly a decade ago.
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) known as EVM Object Format (EOF), which has been discussed extensively in developer circles this year because of some participants’ concerns about possible security risks, is now set to be included in a major package of changes expected later this year or early next, known as the Pectra hard fork.
The EOF proposal is a series of smaller changes aiming to update the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the programming environment that executes smart contracts on the blockchain, and arguably Ethereum’s secret sauce that made it different from Bitcoin and other early distributed networks when it launched in 2015.
Specifically, EOF would make smart contracts more developer friendly, especially for those building decentralized applications in Solidity or Vyper programming languages. The series of changes are incredibly delicate that can break existing smart contracts, so developers have added in a new version, allowing dapp builders to choose which version of the EVM to use when deploying their code.
“EOF will be the first major EVM related change in years,” said Parithosh Jayanthi, a core developer at the Ethereum Foundation, over a text message on Telegram to CoinDesk. “It sets the stage for future upgrades to the EVM and showcases the base layers intent to continue to improving the EVM.”
The EVM standard
As the first and largest smart-contract blockchain, Ethereum has defined the programming standard that many other blockchains have adopted. Other layer-1 blockchains have also found ways to be compatible with the EVM, recognizing how important this piece of technology is in the blockchain industry.
But developers are now looking to introduce a newer version of the EVM, so they can write more secure smart contracts and dapps. With this, some developers have a few concerns that the procedure might create some unintended consequences for the network.
Currently, the EOF component of the Pectra upgrade, Ethereum’s next hard fork, consists of 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (